Dominating YouTube and Google with Video

Google and YouTube are two of the largest search engines in the world, dominating the market alongside other behemoths such as Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Google owns YouTube, and sometimes displays a bias towards its own properties. In this context, you might notice when searching Google that YouTube videos often appear on Page 1. For example, when searching for ‘comb cat hair’, the following results show up:

Similar results come up in thousands of searches, so how can you capitalise on this opportunity to get the word out about your business and attract new customers?

Keep reading and you will find out precisely how to get results today.

Step 1: Brainstorm

The key to success is solid research. Let’s imagine you are a veterinary surgeon looking to attract new patients to your surgery. You have identified that there are dog owners in your town, and you’d like to sign some of them up.

Let’s think about problems or needs dog owners have when it comes to looking after their dogs:

Problems:

Allergies

Ear Infections

Worms

Ticks

Fleas

Hotspots (= dermatitis)

Vomiting

Diarrhoea

In case you are wondering how we at Tinderpoint know so much about canine illness, we don’t really. We found this search engine called Google, undertook some content research and content curation, and it told us everything.

Services

Treating any of the above

Vaccinations

Canine euthanasia

These are research areas we will explore to find instant YouTube and Google domination opportunities.

Step 2: Research – Volume

The next step is to check how many people are actually looking for the terms we type in. After all, what is the point in ranking a video at the top of Google and YouTube on ‘How to Treat My Dog for Canine Herpes’ if no one searches for that?

Referring to our research topics above, it looks as if an average of 210 people a month look for ‘How to Get a Tick Head Out of a Dog’ on Google.com. How can we tell this many people search for precisely this? Simply use a tool called SEMrush. Here is the screenshot giving this information:

Step 3: Research – YouTube Competition

There is no point trying to rank a video on YouTube or on Page 1 of Google if there are already 20,000 people trying to do the same thing. There is a sea of untapped terms that have no competition at all in every market.

We want to find terms that will yield instant results – in other words, terms with no competition.

Bearing this in mind, let’s check if anyone has made a YouTube video with the title ‘How to Get a Tick Head Out of a Dog’.

First of all, head over to YouTube.com. Type in the proposed title in quote marks, (these are important). Here are the results:

Remember to use quotation marks in the search. This tells YouTube to show you how many videos have that exact title, as opposed to similar titles.

Now we know that if we create a decent video with that exact title, we are almost certain to rank inside YouTube on the first page for the search ‘How to Get a Tick Head Out of a Dog’. Actually, we’re being modest. We will almost certainly be at #1 immediately.

So that’s YouTube sorted. But what about Google?

Step 4: Research – Google Competition

There is something you need to know about Google and video, apart from – as mentioned earlier – Google gives preference to YouTube videos over other videos and other websites since they own YouTube.

Google sometimes makes it easy to put videos at the top of the search engines, and sometimes it’s virtually impossible. Often, there is no logic or reasoning behind why one keyword is easy, and another keyword is hard. There are rules of thumb but that’s all they are. Get practical instead and ask the following questions:

1. Is my video title an ‘explainer’ type video – for example does it include ‘How to’ in the title or does it somehow give the user a visual experience about how to get something done?

2. Are there videos on Page 1 (ideally) or Page 2 of Google for that keyword search?

If the answer to the above questions is ‘yes’, and if you are following these steps in order, you should have a winning keyword. Let’s do these checks now with our term ‘How to Get a Tick Head Out of a Dog’. The answer to question 1 is fairly straightforward – we have a ‘how to’ in the title which is a good start. Let’s check Page 1 of Google.ie for this term:

Boom. There is a video on page one. So, let’s recap briefly what we did so far:

1. We brainstormed typical problems or needs our target audience has.
2. We looked for search terms related to those problems or needs, where there is a known volume of search in Google.
3. We checked that there was no current video with that exact search term as the title in YouTube.
4. We checked that the keyword we were considering was a ‘video keyword’.
5. We checked to see if there was a video listed on Page 1 of Google for that search.

What this means is that if we create a video in YouTube, three things will likely happen:

1. Being the only video with that title in YouTube, we will automatically rank #1 in YouTube.
2. For the same reason, we will probably rank #1 or #2 soon after in the ‘videos’ tab of Google.
3. We will probably take the place of the current video on page 1 of Google.ie and maybe even rank higher, although this can take some more work.
4. Steps 1-2 happen within 24 hours and usually instantly.

Step 4: Create Video

You will probably want to make a decent corporate video and that’s a separate topic. However, for this post’s purposes, we are going to make use of a creative commons video already on YouTube. After all, this blog post is really about rankings, not the video itself.

But, before loading this video onto YouTube, let’s look at some real-time proof. Below is a screenshot of the actual time and date that we looked at Google.ie before uploading any videos.

As at 13:09 on September 15, 2016 (Thursday), we are now going to upload our video with the exact title ‘How to Get a Tick Head Out of a Dog’.

Step 5: Upload Video

Having uploaded the video, and looked back in Google and YouTube, here are the results:

YouTube:

Google:

Step 6: Have a Well-Deserved Cup of Tea and Admire Your New Rankings!

We hope this blog post has opened your eyes to the opportunity that video can bring to your business in terms of branding, visibility, competition differentiation, lead generation and profitability.

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LUKE BASTIN SEO Manager

As a former “Big Four” accountant within the world’s top Pan-European and US real estate funds team, Luke is our SEO expert. He built his first website, an expert’s guide on hang gliding, in 2005 and since then has ranked both his own and clients’ websites for some of the most competitive terms on the internet in the UK, US, and Africa. Away from Tinderpoint, he enjoys cricket and chess.